Every other Friday, the Outside/In team answers one listener question about the natural world.
This week, Andy in Dover asked, "What happened to colony collapse with bees? It seemed like they were going extinct and then it was no longer in the news. Was the problem solved?”
Producer Felix Poon looked into it.
Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Felix Poon: Roughly 20 years ago, something troubling started happening with honey bees.
Lauren Ponisio: So around 2006 and 2007, honey bee keepers started experiencing much higher winter honey bee losses than usual.
Felix Poon: This is Lauren Ponisio, an associate professor of Biology at the University of Oregon specializing in the conservation of plant pollinators. And Lauren says it’s perfectly normal for beekeepers to lose up to about 30% of their worker bees every winter. They run out of food. They get infected with diseases and parasites. But this was different.
Lauren Ponisio: They would leave the colony and then kind of disappear and not come back.
Felix Poon: It’s called Colony Collapse Disorder, when all the worker bees leave the hive for no apparent reason, leaving the queen to fend for herself, usually resulting in the death of the hive.
Lauren Ponisio: There really was no one specific cause. It was a lot of interacting factors like pesticide use and new diseases.
Felix Poon: But a big culprit was a parasite called the varroa mite.
Lauren Ponisio: This little mite was like a little bee vampire, and it was causing a lot of colonies to get weaker and to get susceptible to a lot of these other interacting stressors.
Felix Poon: Colony collapse disorder is a serious problem. We rely heavily on honey bees for industrial agriculture. They pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the U.S. every year, and some estimate about one third of the global human food supply. So, the USDA developed treatments to help bees fend off mites, and they approved new antibiotics. But, according to recent national surveys, things have not gotten any better. If anything, they’re getting worse. This year annual honey bee losses are the highest they’ve ever been.
Lauren Ponisio: Around an average of 55%. This is pretty astonishing. And unlike in previous years, the highest losses are in commercial hives. Usually it's the commercial hives that do really well because they have the most up to date management, and the best technology. So that's quite concerning. And additionally, it's none of the usual suspects. So it's not just like higher mite numbers or something that we've seen in previous years that were associated with colony losses. So scientists really have no idea what caused those really high losses.
Felix Poon: Despite all this, Lauren doesn’t think honey bees will go extinct. In fact, she and other experts say there are more honey bees today than there ever have been in the history of our planet. That’s because they’re really important to us, essentially as livestock, so they’re highly researched and managed. Native bees though are another story. There are two species of bumblebees that are on the Endangered Species list. And several other native bee species are being considered for the list. Not to mention there’s probably a lot of species we’ve already lost.
Lauren Ponisio: It's a very silent extinction because we don't have a lot of data about them.
Felix Poon: But Lauren says one thing we do know is that native bees tend to pollinate some crops better than honey bees do, especially native North American species like blueberries and cranberries. Plus, native bees and honey bees can often interact with each other in beneficial ways.
Lauren Ponisio: So honey bees are actually more efficient pollinators when native bees are around.
Felix Poon: We manage honey bees at an industrial scale. But it’s harder to do that with native bees. Most are what’s known as solitary bees, meaning they don’t live in hives. So you can’t truck them around in boxes and plop them into crop fields like farmers do with honey bees. Instead, to support native bees, Lauren says we have to reduce pesticide use. And we have to make sure there’s food around for them, even when the crops that farmers want to pollinate aren’t blooming.
Lauren Ponisio: To get them to pollinate agricultural systems, they need to be able to live there. They need to be able to survive. So we just need them to have some habitat.
Felix Poon: Like native hedgerows and cover crops, which are good for the bees, for agricultural, and for local ecosystems too.
If you’d like to submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER.
